Connected business is a very dynamic and complex environment. Your desire is to reach out to your customers, partners, distributors and suppliers and create more and more business interactions and activities, that will generate more revenue. The goal here is not just integrate technological silos, in your enterprise – but also make your business more accessible and reactive. The ability to propagate identities across borders in a protocol-agnostic manner is a core ingredient in producing a connected business environment.

SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect, WS-Federation all support identity federation – cross domain authentication. But, can we always expect all the parties in a connected environment to support SAML, OpenID or OpenID Connect ? Most of the federation systems we see today are in silos. It can be a silo of SAML federation, a silo of OpenID Connect federation or a silo of OpenID federation.

Even in a given federation silo how do you scale with increasing number of service providers and identity providers? Each service provider has to trust each identity provider and this leads into the Spaghetti Identity anti-pattern.

Federation Silos and Spaghetti Identity are two anti-patterns that needs to be addressed in a connected environment.

This talk will present benefits, risks and challenges in a connected identity environment